KEI is one of several public health groups working with Sean Flynn on filing comments in the current U.S.T.R. request for comments on the Special 301 process (Federal Register Notice USTR-2010-0003-0129). In addition, KEI filed these comments:

KEI comments on Special 301

18 February 2010

KEI provides the following comments regarding the 2010 Special 301 Review, including but not limited to the Identification of Countries Under Section 182 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Around 100 Members of the World Trade Organization attended informal consultations today in Room E (a mainstay of the green room consultations) to discuss the implementation of Paragraph 6 mechanism which was created to be an “an expeditious solution” for “WTO members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector” that faced difficulties in in “making effective use of compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement”.

The use of the patent system is quite different from country to country. The following table provides the number of WIPO PCT patent filings, by country of origin, from January 2005 to November 2009, per million residents.* The source of the data on PCT filings is the February 2010 version of the WIPO Statistics Database. (WIPO notes the 2009 data are provisional and incomplete). The PCT counts are based on the international filing date and the country of residence of the first named applicant.

International patent filings under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) fell by 4.5% in 2009 with sharper than average declines experienced by some industrialized countries and growth in a number of East Asian countries.

In the United States, tax exempt non-profit organizations are subject some some requirements for financial disclosure via the IRS form 990, which is available to the public. The disclosure requirements cover most U.S. based trade associations, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade association for some 28 “member” companies.

As mentioned, before WIPO is holding a symposium on February 8, 2010 on the “Evolution of the Regulatory Framework of Test Data – From the Property of the Intellect to the Intellect of Property”. The symposium will be held from 9:30 AM to 5 PM in Room B of WIPO headquarters.

The program of the symposium can be found here: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/wipo_ip_lss1_ge_10/wipo_ip_lss1_ge_10_inf_1_prov.pdf